FREEZE! The Grassroots Movement to Halt the Arms Race and End the Cold War by Henry Richard Maar III

Abstract

Henry Richard Maar III gives the reader the most definitive study yet of the nuclear weapons freeze movement and its impact on the arms race in the 1980s. (Full disclosure: As the chief foreign policy adviser to Senator Edward M. Kennedy from 1977 to 1984, I wrote the U.S. Senate resolution favoring a nuclear freeze, which Senator Kennedy introduced jointly with Senator Mark O. Hatfield, a Republican from Oregon.) The book provides broad discussion of the U.S. and European peace movements, covering the policies of the Reagan administration, the role of Congress, debates within the Catholic Church, broader cultural and political trends, and the outcomes in national politics and U.S.-Soviet diplomacy.Maar traces the freeze movement's evolution from a grassroots movement to a national vehicle countering the Reagan administration. He is especially persuasive in his discussion of policy and politics. He convincingly highlights the freeze movement's catalytic role in helping to transform President Ronald Reagan's rhetoric, at least, from nuclear weapons to disarmament advocacy. Maar also tells a compelling story of how congressional leaders, including Senators Kennedy and Hatfield and Representatives Edward Markey (D-MA) and Silvio Conte (R-MA), were able to harness a more diffuse national movement behind a more focused congressional initiative. The book also captures well the irony, even the hypocrisy, of congressional support for the freeze while simultaneously voting in favor of new weapons systems such as the B-1 bomber and the Strategic Defense Initiative.Maar acknowledges the tactical compromises the freeze movement found itself having to make with its political supporters, but he underestimates the contribution of the latter to elite support for the freeze. He gives little attention, for example, to how widely Senators Kennedy and Hatfield were able to garner academic, labor, professional, religious, think tank, and business support, which played a large role in transforming U.S. arms control policies in the 1980s.Maar also overstates his argument that the freeze movement played a major role in ending the Cold War. Although the movement did affect U.S. policies, far more decisive were such factors as the Soviet war in Afghanistan, anti-Communism in Eastern Europe, and the bankruptcy of the Communist system in the Soviet Union itself, not to mention the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev.In one of the book's best chapters, Maar examines the impact of nuclear weapons fears on political and popular culture in the 1980s. From Jonathan Schell's book The Fate of the Earth (1982) to the seminal made-for-TV film The Day After (1983), with references to comics, cartoon strips, Hollywood films, rock performances, and television shows, Maar vividly re-creates the spirit of the age and the freeze's place in it.The book is most effective, and moving, in its description of the rise and fall of the nuclear freeze movement itself. Maar achieves his goal of “decentering the narrative away from a top-down focus on the personalities of statesmen.” In the great tradition of U.S. popular movements, the freeze was perhaps most impressive as an expression of the grassroots, and Maar tells that story exceedingly well.